MAJ Ryan Crayne
Butter Bars
I arrived at my new platoon naked—or perhaps worse than naked. In fact, I would rather have been missing my pants than the fabric I was actually divorced from. Up to that moment, I had done everything a 2nd Lieutenant was supposed to have done. I had graduated from my Infantry Officer Basic Course, and I had attended and passed both Airborne and Ranger School, yet I was still missing something. When I joined my platoon of roughly 30 Paratroopers, there were 59 total 82nd Airborne patches on our cumulative uniforms. From the most junior private to my new platoon sergeant, every single Soldier had recently returned from a deployment to Afghanistan; I could read their deployment history plainly in the unit patches proudly displayed on both shoulders of each Army Combat Uniform (ACU). One of my new sergeants, while telling me about their deployment, referenced his dual AA patches. Ironically, he claimed he had an “unbeatable hand” with his “four-of-a-kind Aces,” and then he gestured toward my bare shoulder. The empty pile tape on my right sleeve, where a deployment patch would reside once I had earned one, was a distinct marker of my perceived incompetence stemming from a lack of combat experience. I had not done the job—and until I had, I would be part of a lesser caste.
For me and for many others, the absence of a combat patch has a corresponding effect on confidence. As a junior officer, even though I was technically in charge of this platoon, my validity had yet to be earned.
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